"Die Tödliche Doris was born out of West Berlins lively post-punk community in the early 80s. Along with Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria, Sprung Aus Den Wolken and Frieder Butzmann, Die Tödliche Doris ranks amongst the Geniale Dilletanten -- which roughly translates as ingenious dilettantes -- who sought to democratize cultural productions beyond the grip of both Western capitalism and GDR socialism. The Geniale Dilletanten became synonymous with a free-for-all approach to music, film, painting and performance where participants encouraged raw expression through provocation and experimentation. Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen founded Die Tödliche Doris in 1980, presenting the public persona of Doris as a constantly shifting entity that deliberately engaged the contradictions of the human condition. The band often referenced themselves in the third person singular, alluding to Doris as a fully-formed female character with explosive, colorful emotions. For her debut album -- originally released on Zickzack in 1982 and playfully titled " " (that is, blank space surrounded by quotation marks) -- Doris most closely entertains the notion of a typical rock band with drums, bass and guitar. Produced by Neubautens Blixa Bargeld, the thirteen songs presented here are disquieting lullabies of profound anxiety, savage and primitive deconstructions of German polka and manic lacerations of punk minimalism: all reflections of the many and fractured personalities of Doris. This first-time vinyl reissue includes a reproduction of the original 24-page booklet." - Etats-Unis.

"Originally self-released in 1961 and later issued by Folkways, Tod Dockstaders Eight Electronic Pieces is a foundational document of American electronic music and a stunning first work from this revolutionary composer. Refused access to the resources and funding of the academy and without any interest from the record industry, Dockstader assembled his debut album through three years of his own private labor -- recording after-hours at the New York radio station where he worked. Dockstaders approach was informed by the laboratory experiments of his European contemporaries Edgar Varèse and Pierre Schaefer as well as by the aleatory compositional techniques and neo-dadaist aesthetics of John Cage. While Dockstader famously described his music as organized sound, Eight Electronic Pieces is not pure musique concrète. Oscillators pulse and clash with fragments of incidental tape music, leaving collages of sound as tuneful and memorable as they are otherworldly. A visionary debut that presages the abstract ambience of modern IDM and an essential addition to any collection of early electronic music. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl." - Etas-Unis.

"After studying with composers John Cage and Earle Brown, Joe Jones became a prominent figure in Fluxus, contributing to the movements first yearbox alongside La Monte Young, György Ligeti and Nam June Paik. Beginning in late 1961, Jones began constructing his own music machines -- drawing inspiration from the calliopes, automata and orchestrations of the 19th and early 20th century to create self-playing ensembles of stringed instruments, percussion and woodwinds -- played through an elaborate (yet decidedly lo-tech) system of rubber bands, balls and tin foil. Christened the Tone Deaf Music Company, this battery of automated musical instruments generates the sounds on In Performance (originally released in 1977 on the Harlequin Art imprint). With exacting conceptual precision and varied subtleties of natural motion -- not unlike Harry Bertoias sounding sculptures -- Jones machines produce richly-textured strata of sound and serve as engines of paradox. While bringing the figure of the artist-composer to the foreground, the machines ultimately dispense with the need for the performer entirely -- a cunning subversion of the fetish for virtuosity and individual genius. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl." - Etats-Unis.

"The origins of Le Forte Four are those of the Los Angeles Free Music Society itself. Chip Chapman joined forces with Rick Potts (and shortly thereafter Tom and Joe Potts), taking up the LAFMS name in 1974. Ultimately baptizing themselves Le Forte Four, they began threading imagined lines between John Cage and The Residents, Cecil Taylor and Henry Cow -- generating sounds completely unlike any of these and anything since. The inaugural release on the eponymous LAFMS imprint with only 200 copies pressed originally, Bikini Tennis Shoes is a staggering piece of anti-music that remains as refreshingly ground-clearing today as it was when it first appeared in 1975. Its 40 minutes (parceled out across nearly as many tracks) chart forays into free improvisation, Buchla misuse, filtered noise, begrudging and damaged melodic sorties (from the Star-Spangled Banner to Stravinskys The Rite of Spring) and healthy doses of basement pablum. Le Forte Four emerged out of the lethargic American 70s as a locus where, in their own words, gamelans and ragas merged with serial and chance compositions finally melting together with instructional records and Beatles bootlegs. A wildly eclectic rummaging of postwar culture and 20th century sound, Le Forte Fours Bikini Tennis Shoes preempts punks outsider ethos and DIY autodidactism. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl." - Etats-Unis.

"The brainchild of visual artist Jordan Belson and electronics polymath Henry Jacobs, the Vortex Experiments ran from 1957 to 1960, first at San Franciscos Morrison Planetarium and later at the SF Museum of Art. The very name of these events announced their aim: a swirling totality of sensory experience. Around Belsons richly-colored visuals -- making use of the planetariums entire dome and featuring luminous, sharply geometric imagery projected through an array of devices -- Jacobs ringed a system of roughly 40 multidirectional loudspeakers, each of which could be precisely controlled to produce, in the words of one reviewer, a living theater of sound and light. A landmark recording in the history of electronic tape music and an engrossing artifact of proto-psychedelia, Highlights Of Vortex gathers recordings designed for the Vortex system by Jacobs and collaborators David Talcott, William Loughborough, and Gordon Longfellow. Source material including free improvisation, field recording, classical Indian instrumentation, West African polyrhythms and musique concrète is transmogrified through tape manipulation, atomizing swathes of reverb and delay, and other live and recorded effects, making dramatic use of the monumental Vortex soundsystem. An unprecedented marriage of image and sound, Vortex Experiments exercised immeasurable impact on the imagination and practice of countless experimental visual and sonic artists so this album is a must for fans of such visionaries as Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, and Jack Smith. Limited edition of 500 numbered copies on clear vinyl." - Etas-Unis.